You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 4 Bebop Hacks That Will Blow Your Mind

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

Does your bebop sound like a dud? Turn it into an amazing fireworks display with these 4 tips from Peter and Adam.Today's episode is sponsored by Anytune (featuring an Anytune remix fn the theme song!) Anytune is the perfect tool for anyone looking to improve their practice sessions. Learn, transcribe, and practice solos by slowing down the tempo, adjusting the pitch, and (for Pro+ users), isolating specific instruments in the mix. For more info, follow this link. And for access to the Android beta of Anytune, click this link.4 Bebop Hacks That Will Blow Your Mind:Diatonic enclosuresBlues infusionDiminished arpeggio on dominantChromatic line shiftToday's Open Studio Live Events (All times in EDT):1:00 PM - Adam's Daily Guided Practice Session (for Members Only)8:00 PM - Live Piano Duo Concert With Peter Martin & Fred Hersch on YouTubeFor the rest of this week's calendar, follow this linkInterested in more music advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase. And be sure to check out our All Access Pass - every course from Open Studio on every instrument.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Mattis, and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear podcast. Music advice coming at you. Coming at you today, sponsored by AnyTune. Hey, do yourself a favor. Go to AnyTune.us. And check out one of the most useful tools for learning music anywhere. It's fantastic.

It's this. When we talk about active listening and practicing, efficient practice, This is like the intersection of active listening and just uber efficient practicing that you can do with this great app. You can use it on your Mac. You can use it on your iPhone. Android's coming very soon. They just came out with that beta version. And, you know, the idea is this gives you a chance.

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I know you're so a little buddy. No, no, no, that's right. Maybe you spent all month with just Herbie so you can hear what he's doing. Then you learn it, and then you're like, all right, Herbie. It's my turn. You take him out, and then you're just playing with Ron, Tony. It is truly fantastic. Go to anytune.

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You'll hear it. And we're here. on YouTube today. Thanks YouTube for joining us today. We are talking about four B-Bop hacks that'll blow up. Blow your mind. Oh, blow your mind. Is that hacky enough? Something blowing up. Any time we do hack in a title, I'm like, we are such hacks. Yeah, we are.

But we're bringing the hacks. People like the hacks. But these, I think, are useful. These are like, there's nothing hidden about these, but I think sometimes they're not talked about enough. You know, a lot of guys and gals are play this kind of stuff, and then it's like, wait, what was that you did? Yeah. And they'll like, oh, I don't know. It was just something I played. So we try to think of some that we could explain and that hopefully you can infuse into your playing. Try them out, learn them in different keys, try out these different techniques,

see if it is something that you want to use for your playing, not just when you're playing b-bop. This is just, you know, they're b-bop-ish type things, but they can be used, I think, in a lot of different situations. That's right. Let's go in with number one. Man, I don't know about you, but I feel like this idea of diatonic enclosures just is really more about like how to play melodies and create melodies out of very simple material. The older I get, the more experienced I get at playing piano and learning about bebop and jazz, the more I realize how important these kinds of things that are, right? Like, what can I do very simply with just the core, the scale of the chord that I'm on? So this is, we're calling it this diatonic enclosures. It's really a way to

surround a note of a chord. So let's say you're playing a B-flat major scale. Or that, those are your note choices, right? You got a B-flat major 6-9 chord, right? Well, we can just play, let's say, a D. But to get a cool B-Bop sound, you can surround this in various ways without even going outside of the B-flat major scale. Check this one out. What do you know about that? Or how about this? Right? You can vary this in different ways. Just taking the two notes, the one above it and the one below it, right? Yeah. How many different combinations can you come up with around that? note. You know, like just doing that, we have so many options and stuff like, like mixing this in with scales or a pedigos. That kind of thing. Now we're sounding like

bebop musicians. That's right. And and you know, one way to do this, and you know, we've talked about this before with regular enclosures, which are typically either chromatic on both sides or chromatic on one side in diatonic. And this is a great other concept because you're entirely within the scale. But you can think of, like, nice rhythmic-based riffs that you would play and then add this onto them. So it might be like...

Yeah. Yep. Or... You know, it's so many different cool little things or just, you know, just varying up the rhythms, really. And then you could start expanding it to not just the surrounding diatonic notes, right? So, right, you could do that,

and then maybe, you know, like... You could use any diatone... tonic note above it or any diatonic note below it. So instead of, maybe it's, you know, like you can start creating melodies. It's not traditionally an enclosure, but like you can use it the same way instead of like, you could do, you know, move these around in that scale. The safe spacer, safe spacer, no, the space saver. Space saver, space invader.

The space saver mentally in this is that we're only thinking B-flat major, right? there's no other notes that we have to know or know or think about. We're just thinking in this shape of just like, like those, that's all just B flat major surrounding target notes. Yes. And I mean, a lot of times we'll think like,

oh, well, that's not one of the more exciting, sexier kind of bebop things. But this is like, we're always combining these with other things. Yeah. But also,

this is an example, some really good restrictive practice. Take a little pressure off you thinking about chromaticism or blues or some of the things that we're going to get into and think about like, really effective practice is when you can take something restrictive and make it work and sound good.

Once you're improvising and playing, you can pull anything out at any time. There's no restrictions. But I think it's very good to practice in a restricted way. There's nothing better than just straight scale notes. If you can make that sound good, you'll be able to add in a little bit

of neighbor chromaticism and stuff to really make it work. Well, and where I got this from was I was transcribing some Clifford Brown. And Clifford Brown is a master at this. I was actually struck in his lines that I was transcribing and how much diatonic things like this he was doing. He was so good at it.

A lot of triplets, 60-dil triplets. Yeah, exactly. Instead, you can do like, or you could do, you know, all diatonically is the way he, and he would throw in chromaticism for effect, but I realized like, I want to master this as well as Clifford Brown did, of just being able to play within that scale. So, hey, by the way, if you're watching on YouTube, how about a little like and subscribe right now? You know what I'm saying?

If you found that help, smash that like button, subscribe. turned the little bell on, right? It's not going to kill you. It's free. The bell's diatonic. You know what I'm saying? That's like, ding. Nice.

All right, what do we have to number two? Number two, we have blues infusion. This sounds, it's either, this sounds like it could be a band on a, on a Cialis commercial. Like, you know, some middle-aged dudes getting together in their garage. The name of the band is blues infusion. That's funny because it's blue pill. That's good.

Yeah. So, right here. Okay. So this is like, we're talking about, um, you know, bluesy stuff, but specifically within B-bop, so it might be... Yeah.

Let me do it better right there. Yeah. And a lot of times, you know, the way to do this is to throw it in the middle of a phrase. A lot of different ways to do, of course. But like, let's say you got F-minor 7 going to B-flat-7 to E-flat-major.

Let's see. And then you come out of it real straight kind of B-bop, right? and what I'm doing there is, you know, a lot of ways to do it, but I'm playing, messing with the blue scale of where I'm going, not where I'm at. So you could do, but that's a little much. So I'm thinking E-flat blue scale.

Whoa, my little cable there. Why can I have nice things? What's up? That kind of thing. Don't sleep on the major blue scale. This works really well like, like, right? You know, so if we're in a 251 here in G, we got our A minor, a little D-7 alt,

Yeah. Yep. And then when we get to that G, how about a little G major blues scale? That's really like the E minor. B. That's good. That's good. I'm just thinking there's, you know, just over the, just over a minor too.

Like these are where you're leading to is good, but I think even over a minor or a dominant. The way you can kind of mask it is throw in a little bit of like B-Boppish dominant seventh and major seventh along with the blues. So yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fun. Love it. Okay. Blues infusion, what? Blues infusion.

Today on NPR music. Okay. Number three, this is... Driveway songs. That's right. Diminished arpeggio on a dominant chord. This is such an easy hack, and this will make you sound so good, so fast. So, again, let's go back to our B-flat, 7, or 25 to B-flat, right?

So on this F-7 chord, right, if we think about this as an F-7-flat-9, which, by the way, That's kind of up to you to put it in there. In most cases, dealer's choice. Dealer's choice on a dominant chord, especially a five chord to a one. You have that choice of doing like a flat nine, you know, an F-13 flat-9 with that G-flat in there. So what a lot of people may not understand is this is actually based off of that 13-flat-9. It's kind of based off of the half-hole diminished scale, right? That F-half-hole diminish scale.

And with that comes some arpeggios, some diminishes. chord arpeggios, right? The four notes of G-flat, A, C, and E-flat together, check this out. This is going to blow your mind, Peter. I know you already know this, but I'm still going to blow your mind. Check this out. And then, wait, wait, not done yet.

Uh-huh, uh-huh. What if we took it up another inversion? When you know about that? And how about finally? It's four, right? That's four, right? That's the diminished cycle. So these arpeggios, right?

E-flat, G-flat, A, and C. in any combination, they resolve, they kind of surround a note of this B-flat major 6th chord, right? So you get this. Yeah, very soothing. This is so handy when you want to do things like,

right? Or how about that kind of thing? That works great. Yeah, and you're kind of coming out of a little surround to a target area. Exactly. It gives you a now. Natural enclosure.

Right. Yeah. So I'll just give one little extension. I think this is kind of related because it is based upon the half hold diminished as well. Is this a bonus? It's a little bonus.

Should maybe do put the bonus bell on? For the bonus, why don't you put the bell on for the bonus? You know what I'm saying? Like and subscribe. Yeah, there you go. So we got, we'll stick with the F7 here, the five going to the B-flat major.

So those are the straight diminished arpeggios. But if you start up on that C, so this is a diminished arpeggio. So this is a diminished arpeggio. where you're subbing out the major seventh, which is part of, it's still part of your half-hold diminished. And then you can go through the same,

through the same. And that's going to resolve that same notes within the major six as well. I mean, this is the beauty of the... You can bring it down, too, that diminished scale. Yeah. I love... This is what's so great about the diminished scale

is it's so symmetrical that you can do cool stuff. Yeah, and you can kind of think about it like in advance a little bit, like C minor 7 to F7 to B flag. What? Yeah, so even though you're on a C minor... Can't do that. You damn sure can't do that in Missouri, man.

I know that's the fact. State legislature won't let that happen. Get out of town. So that's the diminished arpeggio on the dominant chord. Again, no more useful tool in an improviser's arsenal. No. I just always wanted to say that phrase. Number four is the chromatic line shift.

What do we mean by the chromatic line shift? It's where we take it up a chromatic during the line. That's right. So, you know, a lot of times if we think about, so 251 to C, so you might go E flat minor to A flat seven, kind of adding on a half step above as part of your melodic line before, you know, even though it's not officially there. So it'd be like instead of, you go like,

so it'd be like that kind of a thing. So E flat minor 7 to A flat 7. Yeah. You look confused. Or bored. I don't know. No, no, no, I'm just trying to. I'm wrapping my head around it.

So are you doing it in the middle? Are you doing it in the beginning of the line? Well, this would be in the beginning of line. I think next level will be kind of in the middle. But it's just like a typical, well, like say you're in here. Then you've got one bar of B flat minor to E flat 70. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it'd be like, you know, you're just layering that in,

especially on faster temples that works good. But what this actual number four is, is just throwing that in the middle of the line as opposed to just being like, like where you're layering it. So it's the same example. So you put a line like instead of so you're starting at the regular one

shifting up just a little bit and then bring it down. Try it again. I think I got it. So that's like 251 to C. How can my note sound like that? No, no, no. Are you doing a 25 in the 25?

Is that what you're doing? Kind of. So like D minor for bar to G7 to C major, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I actually like to do it even where you shift up and then you don't come back down. So it'd be like D mine, G7, E flat minor, A flat seven, C major. Oh, what?

That's hip. Yeah, and a lot of times these things, especially when it's going by quicker, like you just do a little, like you do something very solid rhythmically. You know, it might be like, where you're just continuing along the line You're just using this as like a little bit of a melodic, like a harmonic area to go with the same melodic shape.

So in other words, like, yeah, typically we think about going like, where you're taking something and then you're repeating it. Yeah, and that can be cool at times, but this is like one line that just weaves through it. Blow my mind. You're blowing my mind. Yeah. It's almost more of just a concept than, like, you have to play it this way. Woo, okay, I got lots of shit on.

Well, we hope you are going to, shit on that too. That's good stuff, Pete. You know what I'm saying? Dang. You're a good too, man. You're a good too. Mine are okay, but that was really good. Why can't we have nice things, Matt? Why can't we have nice things? We're still getting acclimated into the, what do we call this?

The pod. Pot hall. It's like a food. The way you said it is sounded like pot hole. I know. This is our giant pot hole here. It's our socially distanced. Yeah. Pod hall. We're trying to stay safe as things are opening up and yet still getting worse somehow.

Yeah. The world is opening up. Come on out, the water's fine. Don't mind the sharks. That's right, that's right. No, but this is really fun to do, man. We got a brand new Hammer 88. Got the Doppios. We're back to Doppeos.

I got mine at home, and I'm hoarding it now. Good stuff. So, yeah, if you guys enjoyed this and you want to see more like this, just hit the like button, subscribe to us. We're doing these every week here. Put that bonus bell on. Put that bonus. You might get a Jonas bonus.

So you can, that's the extra kid and the Jonas brothers. You didn't know that, yeah. So we're here every week on YouTube. We've got a couple of tutorials coming out. You're going live at least a couple times a week on YouTube. We've got a lot of fun stuff happening. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

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